Unique among ambassadors

Ilir Dugolli has been Kosovo’s ambassador in Brussels for more than four years, a testament to how far he and the country he represents have come. Dugolli’s official title, ‘ambassador plenipotentiary and extraordinary’ at the embassy of the Republic of Kosovo in Brussels, contains a – presumably deliberate – ambiguity; he is undeniably more than simply Kosovo’s ambassador to Belgium, but emphatically less than Kosovo’s ambassador to the European Union.

Five of the Union’s 27 members, Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain, have not recognised his country’s independence. Thus Dugolli is accredited to Belgium, Luxembourg and – improbably – Estonia, but not to the EU.

Still, for a man who went to law school in basements and backrooms, Dugolli has come a long way. As he studied in the 1990s at the University of Pristina, his hometown (the capital of the Yugoslav province of Kosovo) was a city under siege. Slobodan Miloševic, Serbia’s autocratic ruler, had crushed Kosovo’s autonomy and banned higher education in the Albanian language, the mother tongue of the vast majority of the province’s inhabitants. There were roadblocks at which young Albanians were stopped, searched and often detained by Serbian security forces. Demonstrations were suppressed with batons, tear gas and live rounds. Professors and students reacted by going underground and creating a parallel universe of learning.

Conflict

In 1999, everything changed. A brutal Serbian anti-insurgency campaign against rebels from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had started in earnest the previous year, provoked NATO into military action, wresting control of Kosovo from Serbia for the first time since the early 20th century. Until the first Balkan war exactly 100 years ago, Kosovo had been part of the Ottoman empire. Now it became a United Nations protectorate.

That year, Dugolli left for Budapest to study comparative constitutional law at Central European University, a graduate school founded with support from philanthropist George Soros to educate new elites from the post-Communist world. After gaining his Master’s degree in law in 2001, he became a co-founder of the Kosovar Institute for Policy Research and Development and a lecturer at Pristina university’s law school, and later a fellow at Yale University.

In parallel to his academic and think-tank work, he also became involved in policy. In 2002-04, he served as principal adviser to Bajram Rexhepi, Kosovo’s first democratically-elected prime minister, leader of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), which had emerged from the KLA’s political wing. When the PDK lost power late in 2004 to a new coalition headed by Ramush Haradinaj, Dugolli became an adviser to Agim Çeku, a former senior KLA commander. Çeku had taken command of the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian crisis force set up by the UN to absorb demobilised KLA fighters.

A brief interlude followed during which he sat on the board of Kosovo’s independent media commission. In 2008, he was appointed to his diplomatic post in Brussels when PDK leader Hashim Thaçi (another former KLA commander) returned the party to power and Kosovo’s assembly declared independence.

Brussels was the first of nine embassies opened in the immediate aftermath of the declaration. Today, Europe’s youngest state has around 20 embassies around the globe. Building something from scratch – there were no laws or rules governing the diplomatic service when he started, no embassy building, no staff, no bank account – was one of the big attractions of the job, Dugolli says. Only in 2011 did Kosovo acquire the building which houses the Brussels mission – the first embassy building it owns anywhere in the world.

Dugolli, who now has a staff of seven, says that in practice his ambiguous status makes little difference. “I talk to all sorts of people [from EU institutions and member states] all the time,” he says, and describes the relationship with the Union as strong. But while the recognition question remains unresolved, he will remain unique among ambassadors in Brussels.